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Biggest Headache For Game Developers: Abusive Fans
chicksdaddy writes "Haters keep buyin' — that appears to be the dynamic playing out in the ever-hot video game industry, where game developers say harassment and trolling from their rabid fans is turning them off of development completely, according to a report over at Polygon.com. 'Fans are invested in the stories and worlds that developers create, and certain design decisions can be seen by fans to threaten those stories and worlds,' said Nathan Fisk, lecturer at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-author of the book Bullying in the Age of Social Media. 'Harassment silences and repositions content creators in ways that protect the interests of certain fan groups, which again is no justification for the kinds of abusive behavior and language seen online today.' The problem is widespread enough that it may even pose a threat to the future of the industry. Developers, both named and those who wish to remain anonymous, tell Polygon that harassment by gamers is becoming an alarmingly regular expected element of game development. Some developers say the problem was among the reasons they left the industry, others tell Polygon that the problem is so ubiquitous that it distracts them from making games or that they're considering leaving the industry."
Yes, it is nice if you have the developers actively communicate with the fan base, but many times, those fans that post on forums the most end up making demands, and in many cases don't fully appropriate the fact that the game developers know what they are doing much more so than the fans do.
Blizzard has CMs (community managers) that act as a buffer between the developers and the fan base. They are trained and hired to deal with the various disagreeing opinions, while being able to recognize when there is a clear consensus that is sensible and something the devs should be aware of. Most people know 2 of the developers: Greg Street, who has taken it upon himself to meet this challenge, and Chris Metzen who primarily works on Art, voice, and lore, which people generally don't complain about too much (although it does happen).
I see way too many game companies let their developers just openly communicate with the fan base unbuffered, and they need to take a hint from Blizzard to let the professionals handle it.
It sounds as if game developers are learning what sci-fi/fantasy writers already knew; fans can be rabid and irrational. For most authors this isn't a problem because they sell in the 5 or 6 digits and there may be just one crazy fan. But every AAA video game has millions of players, so the number of crazies can be much larger.
This is why Neil Gaiman was forced to tell people that 'George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.' Because rabid fans wanted GRR to be their bitch, and because he now has such a large audience their harassment was getting out of hand.
The solution to this is to grow a thick skin and/or to get a secretary that will read and filter your mail for you. Or you could make games that only sell 10k-100k units, so the fanbase doesn't reach a critical mass of craziness...but if your company is addicted to money then being a smaller part of the market isn't an option.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
You see stories like this on other topics. They tend to be hyped up. It's a crisis! Won't someone please think of the children!?
Yeah, it's probably a real issue. No, it's probably not a crisis.
Gamers shouldn't have an entitlement mentality. Game developers shouldn't have a victim mentality. People should be nicer to each other.
Yes, that's exactly what the article is about and not stuff like:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=call+of+duty+death+threats
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bioware+death+threats
STFU, n00bs!
In other words, ignore those kinds of fans: they'll yell and scream and complain, and in the end buy the next version of the game.
I am officially gone from
Ultimately the number of "votes" you get is proportional to what you spend, not how many hours you play. The most vocal people are not necessarily to most representative, nor the biggest customers.
Some gamers have moved from a perspective of critical approval before purchase, "If it's a good game then I'll get it" to a sense of entitlement, "they owe me a good game".
Run that up against the whole process of finding a game idea, fleshing it out, coding it, adding the art & sound, network support, testing, packaging, marketing and if you are in the business you wonder how you succeed at all.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A vocal minority without anything constructive to add should be ignored. I don't see the problem here.
... from the F2P scam, DRM, and taking away peoples ability to own games by making everything F2P or online, where Diablo 3 introduced us to the DEFECT of SINGLE PLAYER LAG. The entire industry at present and the corrupt whiny little bastard game devs (those who are among the corrupt) deserve everything they get.
The Game industry is among the most corrupt on the planet:
-Taking the ability to own and mod games away from players
-Enclosing games by using MMO/F2P server chaining strategy
-F2P/MMO games are locked down and that makes a suffocating environment for fan creativity, mods, hacks, etc, to the original game and more and more games are being completely locked down and gamers being locked out.
Nanny corporation is trying to make people dependent on it in the exact same way as an overbearing totalitarian state would. They want to force a relationship where they continually draw money from people and you never own anything.
This is just more of a trend of game industry not aware of the industry wide corporate corruption that people are getting sick and tired of and the are too oblivious to the justified anger people have at price gouging, bank bailouts, and wars based on lies.
There are more games than World of Warcraft.
Actually, on Free-to-play pay-to-win games, they seem like the most useless demographic.
But who should be getting the abuse you advocate? The executives of the big publishers or the regular folks working for the industry to actually make games? I've disliked games before but that doesn't mean that I should be justified to spew vitriol at the coders, artists and others working in the industry.
Hyperbolic insults, rants, threats and bullying are commonplace in every type of communication over the internet. The anonymity and pseudo-anonymity enable a culture where there is rarely any significant penalty for even the worst insults.
Gabriel from Penny Arcade really summed it up nicely with his Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
So everyone is deserving of abusive, sociopathic behavior? Even the indie developers whose team is small?
No. This is about the studios and developers being undeservedly abused and harassed. Not criticism but blatant abuse from immature children masquerading as adults who have no mental capacity for filtering their insane behavior. It's probably the same lack of mental facilities that cause others to abuse women who stand up for themselves.
These are many of the reasons I'm a big fan of Nintendo. They care about the developers, take their time to develop the right product, and don't engage in this microtransaction nonsense. Even with games like Pokémon Rumble U, Nintendo promises that you can see everything there is in the game even if you don't buy their collectible figures. I'm glad Nintendo ignores the investors (iOS!) and the non-Nintendo fans (MMOFPS sports game please!) to make a quality product that doesn't rely on these "shady profits".
All those evil things you describe; sweatshops, layoffs, buyouts, DLC, lack of innovation are not initiated by the designers and developers, yet those are the people getting harrassed.
This isn't some anonymous "gaming industry" that gets the crap, it's individual people.
Imagine somebody coming up to the counter of whatever supermarket you work at and start verbally abusing you for decissions made by some upper level management people.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Because the entire game industry is EA and Activision, amirite?
Or maybe there's independent devs who just make games out of love of the art and wish they got some basic degree of respect and dignity from their NAAAAAH lol I'm joking of course, anyone who's ever touched a gaming API is a heartless sweatshop owner who rapes children and eats their dogs in front of their faces for profit.
There is a big difference between complaining about something and being abusive about it, we seem to not understand this concept anymore.
Step 1:
Don't assume your adversary is evil or has some evil agenda. Most people want to do the right thing, however they made wrong decisions along the way.
Step 2:
Discuss your problems rationally. Get some sleep before you start ranting about something. Ok you are frustrated at this level, perhaps because you have been playing the game for 30 hours straight. And it is you that is blacking out every 5 minutes and not the game. Figure out how big of a deal it is. You love the game but your arm polygons sometimes go threw a wall.
Step 3:
Realize that Perhaps you are not the target audience. I mean the "Pony Unicorn Princess" Game is a bit too girly for a 30 something guy. Or "Hell Killer: Mountain of blood", is giving your 4 year old nightmares.
Step 4:
Focus on the good points too. If you are going to tell someone your product sucks and you will never buy it anymore, they won't care, they lost (past tense) a customer. If you give them the good points and the bad points then they could be loosing (present tense) a customer and they may be more open minded.
Step 5:
Realize if you complain about something, it doesn't make you seem smart. There is the idea that the Intelligent person must be complaining about something and people who are in generally happy must be dumb, isn't really the case. If you like it, it is OK. Stop trying to find faults in everything.
Now you can complain about stuff.
Lets say the game says it should work on your system requirements, but it doesn't load up. Or you get bugs that prevent you from winning, you can complain about those, however you should also preference with the fact you like the game otherwise.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
MMO devs often take a fairly hands-off attitude about their community, don't do anything about harassment and griefing... then are confused that their community is dominated by toxic people.
Yes, it's a great thing to be thick-skinned, but it's not a moral virtue, it's just really useful. The people who are trying to offend other users and mock them for being sensitive are not really good for your community, and if you keep tacitly endorsing them, you end up with a community of people who have learned that abuse works, because the people it worked on mostly left. Then they do it to you too, and suddenly it's a problem...
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
This direct communication can actually do more harm than good. The most vocal in a community are not necessarily speaking for the majority and I think game developers make that mistake all too often. They attempt to appease the loud minority which ultimately pisses off the happy majority when the changes are put in. The reality is the unhappy minority will never be happy anyway. They hate their own lives and these developer forums are just a medium for them to express it. I've always had difficulty understanding people who spew their vitriol on developer forums. I wonder why they don't just simply stop playing if it's really as bad as they say it is. Star Wars Galaxies comes to mind where the complaining was so bad from the minority that they changed the game. The problem was the change was so bad it pissed off the majority. Everyone quit to go play WOW but the harassment continued. I think the lead developer of that re-write ended up killing himself years later. Really? Over a game? People need to lighten up. It's a game. Not your real life. Just because you waste your life away playing a video game doesn't give you any rights to demand anything. If you don't like it, quit. The bullying and harassment should be completely ignored. In fact, I would keep the developers away from hearing or interacting with the customer entirely. Allow them to fulfill their creative potential without the noise.
Alternatively, the most straightforward way to stop criticism from disaffected "fans" would be to give them what they want, rather than assuming that some designer somewhere knows better.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Isn't that sorta like abusing the rowing slaves for the lousy conditions on the galley?
Since when is "I will find you and kill you" useful feedback, let alone appropriate? And who should have to listen to dreck like that?
I'm still mourning the loss of Fez II thanks to all the haters and trolls :(
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
man if you haven't felt "OMG WHAT THe FucK I PAID FOR THIS SHIT WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FUCKING INVISIBLE WALL DOING HERE AND WHAT THE FUCK BUGGED MENU tOOK MY ITEMS" then you really haven't played at all.
anyways, it's not like they're going to go through with the threats unless they screw over south koreans with some loot disappearing bugs.
besides than I'm pretty sure if you found guys responsible for kotor2 release and whoever came up with me3 ending you could get away if it was a "jury trial of your peers"..
I don't think that any game developer with any vision is going to stop developing because some guys bitch on twitter though... many more are going to stop because nobody gives a fuck either way about their games.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Wait, the game industry treats its people badly, so that means it is morally ok for fans to treat them badly too because it is their own fault for being game developers?
Yes - self-censorship. The internal voice that says, or should say, "This is something that should not be said to another person, since I (ideally) don't want to be a jack ass".
Death threats are not criticism.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
As an extension of this, see if there's correlation between this entitlement and the increased ubiquity of pre-purchase offers in the industry. I can understand the demands given you paid $60 for the game 3 months ago.
Gaming industry deserves all the abuse it gets. Extreme cases of abuse aside, all criticism is they get is deserved.
No one deserves amount of naked, unbridled hatred and venom that the internet can generate, least of all people who are trying their best to make something nice for you.
Besides, all the nonsense you complain about is management level decisions. It's the creative types who are feeling the venom, and it's much harder to be creative and make something fun when you're being told how worthless you are and how you should just die than it is to make soulless marketing decisions.
In other words, your nerd rage does nothing but weed out the people who might make things better and leave only the ones who just don't care.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Really? You're going to go down the "blame the victim" path here? It's the developer's fault that some people in his audience are childish tools?
That's fucking ludicrous
Part of good game development business practice is to NEVER have developers talking directly to fans or viceversa. There should be middlemen who do that, namely community coordinators, moderators and such.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Jesus there's some warped people on this particular thread.
No one is entitled to "...any and all kind of abuse directed at these corporations" as a behaviour. So, I don't like a product you produced, it's ok for me to come a shit on the front steps of your corporate headquarters? Because that's just a building right? It's the corporation that owns that building so no people were harmed in me heaping abuse on it.
Because the building just cleans itself, the hate mail just opens and reads itself, the corporate drone on the other end of the phone line or administering the forum isn't a "real" person, they're just a cog in the machine. If they go home depressed or upset by your perfectly justified death threats, well, that's the fault of how the company is structured and run?
Wow.
>>>Wait, the game industry treats its people badly, so that means it is morally ok for fans to treat them badly too because it is their own fault for being game developers?
No, the game industry treats customers badly by pushing derivative and faulty product and engaging in abusive practices. The fans, who happen to be paid customers, react to this and lash out at company representatives. Since whole gaming industry is riddled with poor management and questionable practices they do not have any mechanisms in place separating employees as people from getting ire directed at the company.
Saying criticism must stop is sticking your corporate heads in the sand. Customer criticism is there for a reason. It is yet another gaming industry failure that it happen to fall on specific individuals not involved in PR.
So...games go from being able to show 20 sprites at a time to 10's of millions of polygons, screen resolution quadruples and you think the budgets should stay the same? Maybe you think the budgets should go down. It's clear you have no idea what you are talking about. I'm not saying that to be mean, but there are some pretty obvious reasons for the budgets growing like they have and they have been known since the "CDROM" game collapse.
1) Development cycles have stayed roughly the same 18-24 months-ish
2) Game asset creation is significantly more complex with each new console generation
3) To accommodate the unchanging development cycle more people are added to offset the compressed schedule
4) Games used to fit on a 400K floppy, now game discs are 40 gigs..that is a significant amount of content increase
5) To add to #4, that content requires people to create it, it requires tools to manage it, and innovation to wrangle evolving tech.
I like indie games too, but they will never "take over", they live and die in the puddle made by the hoofprint of the game industry. They exist because there is a larger industry in whose shadow they can stand. I think you have a nostalgic view of the 90's games. I enjoy retro gaming, but I'm always surprised at how my memory of a game does not jive with the reality of the game.
All of that is to say, the game industry needs all the players. If you, Anonymous Coward (way to stick it to the man...anonymously), don't like the mainstream games industry, don't buy their games.
Part of good game development business practice is to NEVER have developers talking directly to fans or viceversa. There should be middlemen who do that, namely community coordinators, moderators and such.
The problem is if you are a new independent start-up that is essentially a one-man show. I would like to point out the experience of Marcus "Notch" Persson who literally did everything in the company at first from writing the HTML for the website, the back end server work, and the actual game development. Yes, now he has the money to hire people to do all of that stuff, but he was at least at first doing everything on his own.
There are other similar very small game development companies I've interacted with that are in a similar position... even with very popular games. Even using the example of Notch those developers start out by interacting with just a small number of die hard fans, but sometimes either they strike gold or some sort of "magic" happens where whatever they produce becomes extremely popular in spite of their small size. They love the interaction with fans, but eventually get real tired of all of the attention.
The question here really is how do you deal with fans in a company where you are so small that you simply must wear multiple hats? You might be able to enlist some volunteers from the fan base, such as what Jimmy Wales ended up doing with Wikipedia in a mostly volunteer effort including some substantial software development and server operations. Still, even those volunteers have limits and eventually you need at least some people who are paid for what they are doing. If you have a smash hit, it becomes even harder as sometimes the growth of the fan base gets ahead of any effort to get community managers (especially paid ones) in position to deal with them.
It is a nice idea in concept, and when a game development company is in a position to separate the fans (heck, any sort of direct customer interaction for any kind of software development) from the developers it is a good thing. I was a software developer on some major software projects, and thank goodness I only provided tertiary support backing up other customer support representatives. Even then, I often made some pretty awful mistakes when I ended up needing to deal directly with customers.... in spite of the fact I gained a reputation of almost always solving the problems involved (hence why I got many of those kind of support calls). Larger and well established companies certainly should put up some sort of barrier between the developers and the fans.
This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, and I'm glad that some people are talking about it. This shouldn't imply you need to be paranoid when you are in that situation, but to put your head in a hole and pretend these issues are not worthy of even thinking about them or doing some advanced planning to avoid some of the problems which come from fan/developer interactions is also just as silly.
So start treating these as actual threats and prosecuting. This isn't 'obvious joke' territory like the stupid kid with a facebook post about eating hearts. Treat threats as threats. Maybe some actual consequences will clean up BS like this.
"At the same time it wouldn't be directed at you as a person".
Bullshit. Verbal abuse is *always* directed at a person. You're rationalizing. The entire context here is abuse and threats, not criticism.
Except if you go to gaming forums, the amount of abusive posters is a sizeable fraction. Either all the happy gamers are not posting ever, or people just go into rage mode online. Yes the death threats are low but the negativity is rampant. And advice of "you shouldn't be a game dev without a thick skin" does not help the problem. Who wants to be in an industry where they know they'll regularly get abuse? It's much simpler to get a job somewhere else, especially as being a game developer is already a highly stressful job even on good days.
I work in the video game industry and have experienced this first hand.
A few years back we shipped the latest instalment of a popular game franchise. Our online publishing partner, who won't be named but their name rhymes with TONY borked the capacity planning for game servers based on their projected demand which was 10x less than what we saw on launch day.
Their servers crashed and the fans came down on us like the fist of an angry deity.
The online abuse was one thing -- being slagged in the forums and on YouTube was to be expected. What we didn't expect was how quickly certain fans escalated their abuse.
It began with complaints to the Better Business Bureau -- complaints that we'd ripped people off by selling them a game that was unplayable. This was annoying but not unexpected.
Then the calls started when one fan found our front desk number and hundreds of frustrated teenage boys began calling, threatening to rape and murder our receptionist and anyone else who was involved in the development if the game. To her credit, she handled them with aplomb but when someone posted our office address, the "fans" began to send "gift baskets." Boxes full of animal (we hope) feces, soiled XXL BVDs, and rotten food. One fan waited outside the office, then confronted her. That was the last straw and she understandably quit the next day.
The most unsettling instance happened when I was walking towards the front door, a police car pulled up and demanded to know if I was an employee of the studio. The officer got out of his cruiser and adopted an intimidating demeanour suggesting that we should fix the "god-dam" game and stop ripping off gamers. When cops start stalking you, you know it's time to find a new line of work.